THE DREAMING STATE 417 



nutrition, not through that of use and experience as if they had 

 developed as Adam's navel is said by the theologians to have 

 developed. Just so might an insect see his hitherto unimagined 

 mate or enemy with delight or fear. 



687. I dreamed lately that I sat in a railway carriage suffering 

 from headache, which a commercial traveller who was next to me 

 tried to cure. I felt extremely grateful. At the same time, as quite 

 an independent person who knew nevertheless he was the same 

 person as the sufferer, I sat opposite, and marked the proceedings 

 of the traveller with some professional contempt and disapproval. 

 The personalities of sufferer and observer alternated rapidly, but I 

 accepted without question the fact that I was both. Because in 

 my waking hours I appeal to past experience and therefore am 

 able to reason from it, I know now that the situation was an 

 impossible one ; but I did not appeal to it then. In another 

 dream I looked at the top of my own head as I lay asleep and 

 noted with regret but no surprise that I was extremely bald. In 

 my dreams I have flirted with Queen Elizabeth and in the same 

 night have been in heaven and hell and have not been astonished 

 that the one bestowed no more delights than the other. Dreams, 

 being thoughts, are as * swift as thought ' : between two intervals 

 of waking five minutes by the clock I have dreamed volumes. 

 Yet of all the immense mass of our dream experiences how little 

 we remember ! Though, as I say, I appear always to dream when 

 asleep I recollect nothing that occurs during deep sleep unless I 

 am suddenly awakened and at once make the record. Even of 

 the visions of light sleep I commonly remember little. It is 

 significant, that though recollection slumbers, yet all the instinc- 

 tive emotions may be felt during sleep. On all counts, therefore, 

 it seems evident that the faculty that slumbers more or less deeply 

 during sleep is memory, and more especially the part of memory 

 which is concerned in recording (not recalling) experiences. In 

 other words though we have plenty of experiences during sleep our 

 minds do not then grow under their stimuli. We become like 

 instinctive animals ; we neither record facts nor grow dexterous 

 in using them. Since reason deals with the contents of memory 

 and is itself one of the contents, reason also sleeps with a sound- 

 ness which is in proportion to the soundness with which the 

 memory slumbers. 1 



1 See Sir Arthur Mitchell's most interesting work Dreaming, Laughing, and 

 Blushing, pp. 5-9. It is sometimes said that intoxication is marked by a pro- 

 gressive loss of faculties beginning with the highest, the last evolved, and ending 

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